SparkyLinux 4.5 is out

As before, Sparky “Home” editions provide fully featured operating system based on Debian ‘testing’ with desktops of your choice: LXDE, LXQt, KDE, MATE and Xfce.

Sparky MinimalGUI and MinimalCLI lets you install the base system with a minimal set of applications and your favorite desktop, via the Sparky Advanced Installer.

Changes between 4.4 and 4.5:
– full system upgrade as of November 29, 2016
– Linux kernel 4.8.7 as default (4.8.12-sparky available in Sparky ‘unstable’ repo)
– Firefox 45.5.0 ESR (Firefox 50.0.2 available in our repos)
– Icedove 45.4 (Thunderbird 45.5.1 available in our repos)
– LibreOffice 5.2.3-rc1
– libc6 2.24, systemd 232-6, python 2.7.12 + 3.5.2, gcc 5.4.1 + 6.2.0
– added 2 new desktops to be installed via the MinimalGUI/CLI and APTus: CDE (Common Desktop Environment), DDE (Deepin Desktop Environment); Pantheon desktop has been removed from the configuration
– all Sparky pages (blog, forums, wiki) are encrypted so they are available via the https protocol now; it did not make changes in Sparky repos
– Netsurf web browser replaced by Midori in MinimalGUI Edition – it does not work well with the https protocol
– added support for ‘exfat’ file system

Big thanks go to our community members, for their intensive help on Sparky forums and community portals.

Known issues:
– the live system does not work well inside VirtualBox (but works fine inside VMware Workstation, in BIOS and EFI mode)